“Make the best arrangements you can for me at Bocken for about the 7th of July, the exact date you shall know later. You can, if you think it better, keep some hold on Obstalden. Dr. Van K---- yields his favorite Rigi, and thinks I can get strong at Bocken or Obstalden; such was the power of your letters on the highest medical wisdom of Düsseldorf. “Nothing could be kinder than your invitation, but I fear that neither my cousin nor myself can permit you to add to our great obligations this suggestion of coming to you as guests. Let us come to Bocken like any other tourists, with the exception that we know we have already friends there to welcome us. My cousin, Miss C----, desires to thank your wife for her good intentions, and hopes to have the pleasure of sketching with her. “I sent you yesterday the only book of mine that I could lay my hands on, a little volume in return for ‘Switzerland.’ There is something about mountains in it, but I fear your book is the more reliable and interesting. “My cousin was greatly pleased with your suggestion of your wife’s sketching and aiding her in pursuit of the picturesque. “Very truly, BRET HARTE.” Delays set in, and he wrote again. “July 23, 1879. “MY DEAR BYERS:--Are you losing your patience and beginning to believe that B. H. is ‘a light that never was on land or sea.’ “For the last week I have been trying to assist somebody, who has come out from the Custom House in N. Y., duly certified to by the State Department, and is ‘wanting to know, you know’ all about ‘market prices and prices current.’ But I think I should have scarcely staid for him, if the weather had not been at its worst, blowing a stiff gale for forty-eight hours at a time, and raining in the intervals. “My present intention is to leave here Saturday, or Sunday, the 26th, but of course will telegraph you exactly when and how. “Yours hopefully, BRET HARTE.” At last, he and his cousin, Miss C----, a charming woman, who soon joined my wife in sketching excursions, reached Bocken. Bocken has enough big rooms for old knights of ye olden time to carouse in, but very few bedrooms for real folks to sleep in. So Mr. Harte and I, for a time, occupied a bedroom together in the annex. I was a gainer by the arrangement, for we sometimes lay awake half the night and more, whilst he related to me reminiscences of his early life in California and his literary and other experiences. They would fill a book, but I forbear. This much only I copy from my diary of the time.